War is hell. The Second World War claimed the lives of tens of millions of poor souls and saw humanity commit unimaginable atrocities. It is a black mark against our species. Battlefield 5 wants to acknowledge this horror. It wants you to feel shellshocked and disoriented as the screams of agony and death mix with tank tracks trundling by and the crack of gunfire whizzing overhead. The playable prologue at the start sees you play as various soldiers in different conflict zones. All of them die. At EA’s review event, I jumped into two days of multiplayer straight after the game’s short, sombre, death-filled single-player prologue. The first thing I did was pull up the customisation screen. Here I saw: a gas mask painted with a Union Jack, equippable red dot sights, and the ability to bling out my assault rifle with a gaudy golden finish. War is hell, indeed. It’s near impossible to talk about the horrors of war while also being reverent of it. There’s a reason people are still hankering for a return to the Bad Company series – it’s partly because it was unrestrained, free to stick its tongue into its cheek and to simply exist as a fun, sandbox shooter. Battlefield 5 wants to put you in the muddied boots of a WW2 grunt, but it doesn’t want to put off new players who just want to shoot things. Therefore, most soldiers are kitted out with fully automatic rifles, they have modern sights on their… [Read full story]